The federal government doesn't need to convict you of a crime to destroy your organization.
Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Treasury Department's authority to designate Specially Designated Global Terrorists, the executive branch can freeze an organization's bank accounts, revoke its banking relationships, and make it a federal offense for any American to donate, pay dues, hire staff, or attend a meeting — all without a criminal indictment, a jury, or a judge finding evidence of wrongdoing. The standard for designation is an administrative finding, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
That is the legal architecture at the center of the Designating Hamas Affiliates in America Act of 2026, introduced April 9 by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX).
Roy's bill would direct the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Treasury to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations — CAIR, the 30-year-old civil rights and legal services organization — as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, freeze its assets, revoke its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, and prohibit any American person from materially interacting with the organization. The bill does not require a criminal conviction. No court of law needs to find that CAIR or any of its employees committed a terrorist act. The designation itself is the punishment.
The Constitutional Framework
The First Amendment protects not only individual speech but the right of Americans to associate for collective purposes — including advocacy, legal representation, and political organizing. The Supreme Court established that principle in NAACP v. Alabama (1958), ruling unanimously that government compulsion of an advocacy organization's membership lists could inflict serious injury on members' ability to engage in their constitutional right of association.
The due process clause of the Fifth Amendment requires that government deprive no person of liberty or property without a fair process. Freezing an organization's assets and making it a federal crime to interact with it — based on an administrative determination rather than a criminal verdict — tests the outer limits of that guarantee.
Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum have raised these objections. The Cato Institute, in its extensive work on civil forfeiture and administrative designation powers, has argued that asset-freezing authority exercised without a prior adversarial hearing raises fundamental due process concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union has noted that SDGT designations against U.S.-based organizations create a constitutional collision between national security authority and First Amendment associational rights that courts have not yet fully resolved.
The First Amendment question is not abstract. CAIR operates as a legal advocacy organization, filing civil rights complaints with federal agencies, representing clients in discrimination cases, and lobbying Congress on civil rights legislation. Under Roy's bill, any American who paid dues to CAIR, donated to its operations, or hired it to represent them in a discrimination proceeding would risk federal criminal liability.
The IRS Parallel
Constitutional conservatives have seen this pattern before.
In 2013, the Internal Revenue Service subjected Tea Party organizations and other conservative nonprofits to years of delays and burdensome document demands. Two federal courts later found that the IRS had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. The Justice Department paid $3.5 million to settle claims brought by Tea Party groups in 2017, according to the Department of Justice press release announcing the settlement. The lesson was unambiguous: when the federal government uses its administrative and tax powers to target disfavored advocacy organizations, the damage extends far beyond the targeted groups. Speech and association chill across the civic landscape.
Roy's bill applies that same targeting logic through a more powerful mechanism — not the IRS's paperwork burden, but Treasury's asset-freezing authority. If the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when aimed at conservative organizations, the constitutional analysis does not change when the target is an organization of a different political character.
"Conservatives spent a decade arguing that the government has no business using the tax code and administrative agencies to punish advocacy organizations it dislikes," said one constitutional law scholar who reviewed the bill's text. "That argument doesn't come with an asterisk."
The Think Tank Connection
The Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based policy organization funded through undisclosed donors via donor-advised funds and private foundations, did not merely support Roy's bill after its introduction. The organization explicitly claimed credit for drafting and sponsoring the legislation. A statement posted on MEF's website April 9 described the bill as a product of the organization's direct engagement with the congressman's office.
That sequence — policy organization drafts legislation, funds the advocacy campaign, claims credit for the bill's introduction — is the same think-tank-to-legislation pipeline that Bastion Daily has documented in Texas's immigration enforcement architecture and the surveillance lobby's push against FISA reform. Anonymous donors fund the organization; the organization funds the legislation; the legislation becomes law; the donors remain unknown.
MEF does not disclose its major donors. Its IRS Form 990 filings reveal its spending but not the identity of the individuals funding it.
The Scope of Designation Authority
CAIR handled 8,683 civil rights complaints in 2025, the highest single-year total in the organization's history, according to its 2026 Civil Rights Report. The complaints ranged from workplace discrimination and hate incidents to immigration-related civil rights violations. Under Roy's bill, every attorney who represents CAIR, every law clerk who processes its filings, and every federal employee who formally receives a civil rights complaint it submits would potentially face legal exposure.
The SDGT designation authority was designed for foreign terrorist organizations with no legal presence in the United States. Applying it to a domestic nonprofit that operates offices in 35 states, employs hundreds of staff, and has litigated hundreds of civil rights cases in federal and state courts is a significant expansion of that authority's intended scope.
The bill's legal exposure is not limited to CAIR. If Congress can designate one domestic civil rights organization as a terrorist entity and freeze its assets based on an administrative determination, the precedent applies to any advocacy organization that a future administration finds objectionable. The Tea Party organizations that won their IRS settlements in 2017 did so because courts found the government's administrative targeting unconstitutional. They would not have found it constitutional simply because a different administration, with different allies in Congress, had applied the same mechanism with more serious legal consequences.
What Comes Next
The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. No co-sponsors have been publicly announced. The legislation faces significant First Amendment headwinds — Roy's own press release acknowledged that the bill "aligns most closely with federal statute and legal precedent," an implicit acknowledgment that the designation of a domestic nonprofit through SDGT authority is legally untested territory.
The deeper question is not whether this particular bill passes. It is what the willingness to introduce it reveals about the trajectory of administrative power over domestic advocacy organizations — and whether the constitutional conservatives who correctly objected to the IRS's targeting of the Tea Party will apply that same principle with equal consistency when the target changes.
The First Amendment does not carry a partisan exemption. Neither should the outrage when government tries to circumvent it.
Bastion Daily covers constitutional law, government accountability, and institutional oversight. Read our full FISA Section 702 coverage at Bastion Daily.